Hacker News: ashleyn

New comment by ashleyn in "Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers"

ashleyn — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:38:14 +0000

Past a certain point there's also a diminishing return on the effort put in to get a raise/promotion and it mostly becomes about managing "up or out" expectations.

I'm about maxed out for development roles compensation wise. By saving most of this compensation and investing it in the S&P 500 and similar indices, I get way more of a return for far less effort. There are days - not months, days - where I'll earn about $7,500 in stock appreciation. The long term trend has me about matching my monthly salary in earnings.

Raises are inflation adjusted so there's no erosion of the underlying capital going into investments.

Why try harder when I'm paid enough to just invest it in the stock market? The biggest problem I have right now isn't how to get a promotion or raise, it's coming up with increasingly contrived excuses to avoid up-or-out and being pushed into more responsibilities.

New comment by ashleyn in "Instructure pays ransom to Canvas hackers"

ashleyn — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:09:50 +0000

Another way to view this calculation: if you keep your infrastructure secure and up to date, you (very likely) don't have to pay any ransom in the first place.

New comment by ashleyn in "Ask HN: We just had an actual UUID v4 collision..."

ashleyn — Fri, 08 May 2026 10:18:37 +0000

There could be a problem with the way the system generates entropy for randomness.

New comment by ashleyn in "Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML"

ashleyn — Mon, 04 May 2026 03:18:54 +0000

It's more Clavicular than Andrew Tate.

New comment by ashleyn in "Apocalypse Early Warning System"

ashleyn — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:14:22 +0000

This is essentially the premise to Fallout, or at least the leadup to it.

New comment by ashleyn in "SDL Now Supports DOS"

ashleyn — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 03:39:27 +0000

FreeDOS is technically a modern, actively-supported DOS.

New comment by ashleyn in "Youth Suicides Declined After Creation of National Hotline"

ashleyn — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 21:09:34 +0000

If a trans kid calls the suicide hotline and the volunteer suggests they stop wearing dresses to school so people won't bully them, I'm pretty sure the outcome will be far worse than anyone intended. There should be specialists who know how to handle specific kinds of callers.

New comment by ashleyn in "Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated"

ashleyn — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:12:20 +0000

I wonder if this will lead to a sort of "open sourcing" of music, where the reputation of what one produces will be improved by releasing the raw DAW files/tracks/etc. Even if AI is used to generate the constituent parts of a manually-assembled track, it would still demonstrate to listeners that there was significant human involvement in the process.

Touring, merch, etc will also serve as good "proof of give-a-shit".

New comment by ashleyn in "IBM AP-101 general-purpose computer [pdf]"

ashleyn — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:26:37 +0000

Also some information on HAL/S, the language used to program the shuttle's guidance computer: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19790006637/downloads/19...

Did a quick lookup on Orion and apparently today the Artemis programme is using C with MISRA-like internal standards.

New comment by ashleyn in "Europe has "maybe 6 weeks of jet fuel left""

ashleyn — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:48:35 +0000

Is rationing really necessary when the price raises enough that people aren't flying anywhere anyway?

New comment by ashleyn in "Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh"

ashleyn — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:44:38 +0000

Retro console homebrew and demoscene are all about this. There's a lot of fun stuff going on in N64 homebrew right now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEo0aQkGnU

New comment by ashleyn in "Florida surgeon charged with killing man after removing liver instead of spleen"

ashleyn — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:58:53 +0000

This occurred in Florida. This is but one isolated incident, yet, I can't help but notice the two examples that come to mind (this and Christopher Duntsch) both occurred in states with leadership that champion deregulation. Even if deregulation was the ultimate culprit, it seems inexcusable to me that academic/medical institutions aren't self-regulating effectively despite that.

New comment by ashleyn in "Florida surgeon charged with killing man after removing liver instead of spleen"

ashleyn — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:52:31 +0000

Immediately was reminded of another case of a grossly negligent surgeon, Christopher Duntsch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Duntsch

I'm sure I and many other concerned patients and potential-patients are asking; how does something like this even occur? What institutional failures in medicine led to two grossly negligent and incompetent surgeons being given the controls to peoples' lives? What safeguards were neglected at the academic and organisational layers, and what are we doing so that this does not occur again? If institutions are doing their job, no case like this should ever get to the point where a prosecutor needs to stop and clean things up, much less to the first maiming of a patient.

New comment by ashleyn in "Kalshi CEO expects US DOJ to prosecute insider trading cases"

ashleyn — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:23:16 +0000

>Prediction markets don't have any "natural" reason like that for excluding insider trading. It's just "game designers" crying their hearts out when someone ruins their game by having an advantage.

I can think of a few very good reasons you would want to prohibit insider trading on prediction markets. Betting on war outcomes; being incentivised to commit war crimes or throw vital operational goals for financial gain. Wagering on public figures' jobs; being incentivised to harm them.

New comment by ashleyn in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

ashleyn — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:45:40 +0000

This goes missed a lot in debates about conscription. The Iran war in the US and the Ukraine war in Russia enjoy very little popular support among military aged men. This is in stark contrast to WW2, and even in Vietnam there was still a strain of thinking of draft resisters as cowards. But wars in this day and age enjoy a shockingly tiny public mandate, and it's entirely possible that governments can only do a draft on paper. Putin is practically unable to push further mobilisation because the first round provoked such stiff violence and resistance.

New comment by ashleyn in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

ashleyn — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:35:37 +0000

Right, a lot of the draft law being male-only reflects a combination of the reality that, relatively speaking, not much war has been waged since the end of WW2, and that much of contemporary gender equality is still somewhat new on a historical basis. So they're really just out of date laws with not much of an impetus to update, at least until recently. The worldwide trend is pretty clearly in the direction of making service and conscription, where needed, more gender agnostic. There are still some realities that don't really change here, such as men being most useful for direct combat, so even if women are conscripted it's likely they'll still avoid much of the worst of warfare simply by virtue of not qualifying for stringent standards.

New comment by ashleyn in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

ashleyn — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:25:23 +0000

Going to assume this phrasing is an awkward translation, but we can see how this works out in tolerant nations with conscription like Thailand. Typically, trans women who are already on a medical pathway are medically excluded from military service. This is less an affirmation of who they are by the military and more of a frank admission that their current state could never be made combat-ready. It's likely that even if SHTF, this would remain the status quo, because it's difficult to imagine draft resisters taking estrogen simply to avoid service. Even if treatment is largely done via informed consent, medical exclusion would likely require blood levels be in a certain range, or certain surgeries performed.

New comment by ashleyn in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

ashleyn — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:07:01 +0000

Ah yes, the new "for tobacco use only" of tech.

New comment by ashleyn in "PSA: Top Google Result for Claude Code Is Malicious"

ashleyn — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:20:55 +0000

PSA: Adblock is non optional for personal and enterprise security.

My gf told me they blocked all addons at work, including adblock. Told her to recommend to the IT department that adblock be mandatory on all computers. Ad networks make too much money not to look the other way on malvertising.

New comment by ashleyn in "2026 tech layoffs reach 45,000 in March"

ashleyn — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 21:54:17 +0000

It's probably a mix of AI productivity boost and market cycle. There is some substance to AI job loss, but I believe jevons paradox will eventually catch up to transformer-based LLM capabilities.

I'm the last remaining frontend developer after multiple rounds of layoffs. With claude code I'm able to do 2x-3x the work I was able to do before it existed. It's hard for me to rationally argue we need more frontend developers.